Elon Musks says SpaceX could begin 'decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft' after Trump threat to cancel contracts

[Admin]

Elon Musk and President Donald Trump are having a very public disagreement at the moment, and NASA could get caught in the crosshairs.

Elon Musks says SpaceX could begin 'decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft' after Trump threat to cancel contracts : Read more

 

[Unclear Engineer]

This is getting ridiculous and tragic.

Because Trump seems to pretend that he never backs down, he might be thinking he could just "nationalize" SpaceX and tell everybody there what to do. But, without declaring martial law, he has no ability to force any civilians at SpaceX to do any work. Failure is possible, success is not. But, so long as a politician has somebody else to blame, failure is acceptable to them. I am afraid this is headed for tragic results. We will probably just hand over the International Space Station to the Russians, who can easily abandon it because they have access to China's space station. Without a crew aboard to maintain it, the ISS will quickly become uninhabitable. And our commercial space station that is closest to being ready depends on first getting its start attached to the ISS.

So, unless the commercial space sector is willing and able to just do its thing without government involvement, the U.S. and Europe are out of the space business unless this gets "fixed" and fast. And even then, a vindictive Trump could use the FAA to block civilian space flights by companies that he dislikes.

Whatever happened to "The government that governs best is the government that governs least"?

 

[newtons_laws]

It seems that Musk and Trump's relationship has just undergone a rapid unscheduled disassembly.....

 

[Unclear Engineer]

There is an obvious pattern to Trump's relationships, so I would argue that this relationship disassembly was very predictable. I predicted it myself, months ago, and so did others. But of course, none of us were able to predict exactly which component would turn out to be the weakest link, and the exact time that the disassembly would occur.

Unfortunately, the end result is not predictable with much reliability, because others will attempt to intervene. We are in uncharted territory, politically. The situation is dynamically unstable, to put it in "engineering speak".